A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Thursday, July 31, 2014

You
can’t always be sure by reading a piece of literature whether the writer is
male or female. Subject matter, plot, and the gender of the main character can,
but don’t always offer clues. But there are particular style problems that
arise more often in female writers, and others that are more typically male.
I’ve observed them for a while, and thought it might be of use if I made a note
of them.

Aside from things like choice of subject
matter and certain writing nuances that they obviously picked up from the
literature that is targeted at them, guys and girls also have different
downfalls in their ability to carry a story altogether. My observations on this
subject may sound familiar, or they might surprise you.

As I was taking a creative writing course
last semester, I noticed that boys and girls often have different overall tones
they naturally fall back on when they have to write something off the top of
their head before planning a full story. There was almost an equal amount of
girls and boys in the class, which was good, since I have a feeling guys might
be a little under-represented most of the time in the world of amateur writing.
We had an exercise where we were all asked to develop a setting.

Without a single exception, (besides me) the
males portrayed a gritty, dark, imposing atmosphere, and the females created a
sunny, fun, breezy atmosphere. I thought this was kind of funny. But aside from
default settings, the way the two genders wrote stories, when we got to that,
made it evident that there were certain things that they struggled with apart
from each other.

Ladies first: In that particular class, the
worst writer, and the best were both boys, the girls weren’t as noticeably bad
or good. They weren’t real big on creativity for plots, though. One did a story
on a teenage girl with anorexia, one on a girl who made some bad decisions and
ended up in bad situations with some guy she shouldn’t have fallen for in the
first place, another wrote about a grade-school girl enjoying summer break, and
another tried a different genre and surprised us all with a thriller involving
a cursed doll. (Really, how many times has that been done before?)

But I keep getting side-tracked from the
thing I’m actually criticizing. The thing that girls do that makes a story hard
to read is they often get so wrapped up in the moment they’re describing, that
the reader is unable to actually see what’s happening, or what it has to do
with anything. Especially in romances, where the couple is talking, and all of
a sudden…her eyes were shining…their hearts were beating…he was glad he had
polished his shoes before going out today… “Do you truly believe me?”

Wait. Believe what? Who? Who’s talking? I
thought they were having problems of some kind. Why’d the action just, like,
totally stop? That’s kind of an example of what I’m talking about. What makes
it even more confusing is when that sort of disintegration sets in, not in some
emotionally intense scene, not when she’s staring up at her man, but rather,
staring at her coffee, or her car keys, or at some other mundane moment. You
can’t just trust your readers to understand the significance of any point in
your story just by letting your writing fall all apart. Keep the narrative
intact, please.

Now for the guys. I have read both rather
lousy amateurs and published, famous authors who write the way I’m about to
describe. I think it would be easier for some publishers to let the male
mistakes slip because you can still understand the story, and it also is a
rather serious-sounding way to write. However, I think most people would agree
that if the story isn’t truly extraordinary, it’s extremely dull to read this
kind of writing.

Here’s the gist of it: some male authors have
major trouble conveying a very essential element in writing, and that element
is—believe it or not—suspense. I recently picked up a sci-fi novel that was
written by none other than Buzz Alden. I generally enjoy reading things that
astronauts wrote, but I had never read a novel
written by one. The book is called The
Return, and there were some rave reviews on the back cover.

But what I found inside frankly bored me. Alden
wrote the story as if it had already happened. Even before he said what
happened, you already knew it had happened and were just waiting around to be
surprised by something. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that he foreshadowed, or
hinted. You just already knew that at least that one really nice guy was going
to get killed on the shuttle, and that the main guy was going to lose his job,
and blah, blah, blah. And it didn’t matter after the fact, because we weren’t
there when it happened and we didn’t care if it did before it did.

There was that guy in my class who wrote like
a guy too. Now, his writing was considerably worse than Alden’s, but it was the
same problem. He never put the reader into the course of the story. It’s more
like he gave them a bird’s eye view of the maze. With the correct course
already drawn out. I can’t remember what any scene in that story was like. I
have no visuals and no feelings, and zero atmospheric impressions looking back
on it.

I’ll inevitably end up talking about and
criticizing sources of inspiration for authors and blame them for bad writing
across the board. Most of the time people are just writing what they’ve read,
with a few little variations and combinations. I won’t pretend to be an expert,
and of course there are probably guys who write poorly “like girls”, and girls
who write poorly “like guys”, but generally, this is what happens. And lastly,
there are probably people who really like authors who write like this.
Apparently there are, because these people do get published now and then, but you, personally have more potential
than that, and know better now.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Hello
everyone. Sorry about the lack of action, my access to internet is limited.
However, I’ve decided to try my best to start posting regularly from now on—at
least once a week, I hope. I plan to start a series of posts this week on the
subject of writing. I’ve recently started writing my eighth novel, and in the
process of all that writing, discovered a few things that might be of interest
to other writers. I have very few readers to date, so spread the word that I’ve
started up this series if you like it, or know somebody who might benefit from
it.

Without further ado:

The Art of Description

I’m aware that right now, mainstream authors
generally are looking down on highly descriptive writing. A lot of modern
authors, novelists, and even poets discourage over-description but little is
said about the issue of under-description. I was reading an article in a
writers’ magazine giving something like “The Ten Rules for Success”, written by
some author whom I frankly doubt that I would ever enjoy reading. One of his tips
was to describe your characters as little as possible. What!?!?

In
matters of art, it’s of the essence to work in a way that is natural for you.
If you really feel uncomfortable describing your characters, don’t do it--but
as a general rule for success?There may
be readers who prefer to have a character left entirely to their imagination,
but I’m not one of them, and as a writer...I really, really, want to tell you
what I see.

And they’ll say, “Oh, no! Don’t tell us, show us.” This is usually good advice, but spending an entire book implying what a character looks like is
a waste of time. I use my characters’ physical appearances to imply other
things. I’m extremely visual in my writing. That same article said, similarly
to be sparse with your descriptions of settings. Again, if that’s you’re
natural style, fine, I just won’t probably make it through the first chapter of
your book, personally, but don’t think that when these “serious” authors say
it’s the only way, that they have any idea what they’re talking about.

Remember that I’m something of a
sci-fi/fantasy author, myself, and that surely effects my viewpoint on this
topic. You could never spend the whole of a science-fiction or fantasy story
implying what the people and places looked like and come out with a
particularly striking piece. You don’t particularly enjoy reading a story that
takes place on multiple planets that you never actually get to see, unless that
supposed to be the point of the story. The antagonist in my
hopefully-soon-to-be-available sci-fi trilogy Stardrift, would not be nearly as effective if you didn’t know he
was seven feet tall with very fair skin, eerily pretty hands, and hair down to
the middle of his thigh.

If you don’t trust the examples of my own
writing, let’s look at a few others. Suppose Emily Bronte never told us what
Wuthering Heights, or Thrushcross Grange, or Heathcliff, or the moors looked
like. What if Ray Bradbury didn’t tell us how the hound looked in Fareinheight
451? What if James Barry didn’t describe Neverland, or Captain Hook? Success!!!
Yep.

Don’t think I advocate describing everything though. I can’t stand it when
authors start giving the reader a laundry list of all the…laundry a character
is wearing. Sometimes it really is
important how a character is dressed, but not always. Have you ever read any
Nancy Drew mysteries? Don’t do that. But there actually are reasons for
describingattire, it can be a great way
to “show and not tell” a character’s mood, or what they’re doing, or as a symbolic
element, if you do that kind of thing.